Rites of the Dead
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: Preslash, HPDM. Harry and Draco at a fellow Auror's funeral, reflecting on losses of their own. Third in the Cloak and Dagger series, sequel to Invisible Sparks and Hero's Funeral. COMPLETE.


**Title: **Rites of the Dead

**Disclaimer: **J. K Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.

**Pairings: **Harry/Draco pre-slash, past one-sided Harry/OMC and Draco/Daphne.

**Rating: **PG-13

**Warnings: **Angst, remembered torture, ignores the epilogue.

**Wordcount: ** 4400

**Summary: **Harry and Draco at a fellow Auror's funeral, reflecting on losses of their own.

**Author's Notes: **This story is third in the Cloak and Dagger series, the immediate sequel to _Hero's Funeral, _which was the sequel to "Invisible Sparks." It's best to read them in order, but for this story, what you most need to know is that Draco and Harry work as partners for the Socrates Corps of Aurors, which is charged with killing the Darkest wizards, known as the twisted. The character whose funeral they attend in this story is an OC who died in the previous one.

**Rites of the Dead**

"The funeral of Auror Eric Latham will take place on Saturday…"

Harry let the card flutter from his hand as he stared at the far wall. His home was nice enough, if small, but at the moment, the sight of the framed photographs on the wall—all of him and Lionel or Ron and Hermione—couldn't keep the words on the card from searing into his brain.

Latham had died in the course of the Larkin case. Of course there would be a funeral, and it would involve Aurors of the Socrates Corps. Harry knew that. In a strange way, he had been expecting this call. At least they had the decency to send a written invitation instead of firecall. He would have had to pick himself up and look as if he'd been using his "holiday" from the Auror office "productively" if they'd firecalled.

But still…

_They couldn't give Lionel a funeral because there wasn't enough left of him._

Harry rose and walked over to the nearest photograph that featured both of them. He and Lionel had been partners for only a year, but there was the chance for a lot of picture-taking when they'd spent as much time in the field as they had, with such a high solve rate. This particular photograph came from the Fredericks case, which they'd taken on right before the Gina Hendricks case.

Lionel was standing in front of Harry, one arm around his shoulders, his grin bright as he held up the special award that the Department had given them: a small golden ship, commissioned to represent the ship where they had managed to corner and capture Hugh Fredericks. His eyes shone. His smile shone. Everything about him was bright, Harry thought, so hopelessly so, in spite of his dark hair and eyes. Harry looked like a shadow next to him.

That was probably why no one had noticed the love, the desperate, unyielding infatuation, in Harry's eyes when he looked at Lionel, which was visible in most of the pictures but which Harry had never talked to anyone about. Well, except Lionel.

And look how well _that _had fucking gone.

Harry turned away from the picture, shaking his head. There had been a kind of rite for Lionel, even if they couldn't give him everything that he should have had, as a loyal Auror for the Ministry. And complaining about it, or pointedly not attending Latham's funeral, wouldn't bring Lionel back or give him the justice that he deserved. He was already in trouble with the Ministry as it was.

He would attend the funeral, and hope that was enough for everyone. If he pretended hard enough, perhaps it could seem as if it was Lionel's funeral, too.

* * *

Whoever had written the invitation to the funeral had done a good job, Draco had to admit. The calligraphy all but flowed across the card. It was done in gold, too, glittering ink that reflected the light in the room when he turned the card back and forth.

It wouldn't have reflected in Azkaban, in the cell he had just come from. He wondered if the person who had sent this would have hesitated if they knew that Draco would receive the invitation to the funeral of a murdered Auror just as he came back from visiting a murderer.

Probably not.

He laid the card down and went to pour himself a glass of wine. The portrait hanging on the wall of his drawing room, the late Gaia Malfoy, clucked at him and shook her head, fluttering the long gilded fan she held reprovingly.

"I despise a man who turns to drink so early in the day," she said.

Draco took a swallow of the wine before replying. "This is the one day in the month when I don't care," he said, looking up at his great-aunt.

Gaia studied him for a moment, her eyes deep and shrewd. Those eyes were green, Draco discovered with an unexpected pang. Daphne's were, too. Not the same color, but close enough that he looked away and took another drink.

"Yes, that changes things," Gaia said, and sat back in the armchair that they'd painted her in. Her small poodle yapped at Draco and then lay down when Gaia lifted her fan. She'd confessed to Draco that her living self must have been mad at the time the portrait was made, to want the dog painted with her. "I'm sorry, Draco dear. And not just because your marriage to her might have put you back in the good graces of your parents."

Draco shrugged. "Nothing could do that, unless I gave up being an Auror at the same time."

"Of course," Gaia said. "And then I suppose I would have to go back with you." Distaste entered her voice that made Draco smile. He had "rescued" her from the confines of the Manor on the basis of her own pleading. She didn't want to spend more time there than absolutely necessary, she'd confessed to him, not when the room she hung in was full of other paintings who could do nothing but gossip about the people they'd known when they were alive and who had married who and whose grandchildren had the purer blood. Gaia wanted adventure and excitement.

For Draco's sake, though, she wished that he could return to the Manor. Draco knew and appreciated it.

"I couldn't marry someone who committed murder the way she did," he said. "Not in self-defense, not even of someone who had been an old enemy of her family's." There were still some pure-bloods—those admittedly ones with more powerful connections than the Greengrass family had and lingering brain damage from Imperius Curses in the war—who might have got away with something like that. "But because he had the last Potions ingredients in the shop, and she wanted them. She lost her temper. She might have done the same thing with me someday. Or with our children."

_That _was the nightmare that haunted his sleep when he came back from Azkaban, far more than the small, confined dark cell that they now had Daphne in. The thought that he might have married her, made her a mother of his children, and then come in someday to find his children's throats slit, in the same quick, brutal, efficient way she had killed the man who was obstructing her attempt to finish her potion in one day.

"I know, dear," Gaia said softly. She looked down at the table. "What's that card you got today?"

"Invitation to a funeral of an Auror who died on the last case," Draco said shortly. Normally, he didn't mind sharing things like this with Gaia, but normally, he hadn't come immediately back from a visit to Daphne, either.

"Then I think you should attend it," Gaia said. "Thinking about others' misery distracts you from your own."

Draco turned and gaped at her. He knew it made him look unattractive, and from the way Gaia tutted and shook her head, she thought the same thing. But her statement made no sense. "Pardon me?"

"Whenever a letter comes back from your father that the owl couldn't deliver," Gaia said, "you go out and renew your investigations on a stubborn case, or begin a new one. Once you went to tell a woman her husband was dead. I was skeptical when you told me that you wished to become an Auror, but it is an effective distraction from the life you lead."

"Sometimes I think it was the wrong choice," Draco muttered, but he knew that it was half-hearted. He had made the choice with his eyes wide-open, knowing that his parents wouldn't be happy. He had never expected an utter _end _to their contact with him, but he hadn't been willing to pay their price, either, which was to drop out of the Auror training program and marry someone they chose for him. He preferred to make his own choice of wife.

_And look how well that turned out._

Draco twitched his head irritably at the thought of that, then said, "I'll go. But not because you're right."

"Of course not, dear," Gaia said, and caught the poodle's collar as it began barking at the fringe of the cloak draped over the back of the chair.

_At least I don't have to live in a small room with a yapping dog,_ Draco thought as he left, the card safely in hand once more. _Being partnered to Potter isn't the same._

* * *

The graveyard was full of shadows.

Or, at least, it seemed that way to Harry, and he couldn't imagine that it didn't also seem that way to some of the other people there. Most of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement had turned out, as they tended to do for Auror funerals, unless the Auror had died in Azkaban awaiting trial for a crime, like what had happened with Vincent last year. Harry looked at the formal red robes and the drawn faces and knew they were thinking about Latham. Most of them would have worked with him, or known him, or perhaps gone to the pub with him. And now he was gone forever, killed by one of the Dark wizards they hunted. It was the kind of death that could give anyone nightmares.

He wondered if that many people would come to his. Perhaps so they could see who else came.

But the shadows didn't all belong to Latham. They belonged to lost partners, and victims they hadn't got there in time to save, and the ones they had thought were safe who later died of their wounds. And even the Dark wizards, on some occasions. Harry knew that he wasn't the only one who had endured a cave-in or some other form of entrapment with a dying Dark wizard who had whispered and pleaded his life away, promising that he would redeem himself if only they would bring him back to light and air again.

_Lionel._

Yes, he was there if Harry looked for him, his shadow in every scarlet robe that swirled past, in the eyes that stayed downcast on the ground, the way they always would be on a formal occasion. He had a much better sense of the proprieties than Harry. It was one of the reasons they had been partnered. Harry didn't think Lionel had taught him as much about the proprieties as Harry had taught him about breaking the rules, though.

He almost smiled, and then saw again the tattered body that had been all that was left of Lionel, all that was left of that gorgeous laugh and the arrogant tilt of his head when he thought he was right—which was almost always—and the coal spark in his eyes when he looked at Harry. It was never more than friendliness from him, it never would be more, but at least when he was alive, Harry could see it there and dream.

"Potter."

Harry started and turned his head. He had lost track of people in the constantly moving mass of scarlet-clad Aurors, all of them so similar, and he hadn't seen Malfoy come up to his shoulder. He wasn't sure how he felt when he saw the git standing there, his frown small and pensive, his eyes on the closed casket where Latham lay.

"Malfoy," Harry finally replied, because it would have been rude not to, and he didn't really want to be rude. Malfoy had been there to see Latham die. He might be struggling with guilt, or at least ghosts, of his own. "Where are Warren and Jenkins?"

"Over there." Malfoy nodded to where the two women, the other members of Socrates Corps right now, stood by the coffin. They had their heads bowed, their hands clasped in front of them. Warren bent down and said something as Harry watched, her lips moving just above the coffin as if whispering a benediction, her eyes closed. Harry felt his stomach squirm, and looked away. It seemed like something private he shouldn't intrude on, though he had no idea if it actually _was _or not.

"Oh," he said quietly. Then he stood there, watching as the wizard in white robes near the gravesite began speaking words about memory and happiness and the brevity of life. Harry didn't know all the details of wizarding funerals, since each one he'd attended seemed slightly different, depending on what the dead wizard had wanted and their blood status and how traditional they were.

Huh. Come to think of it, he didn't know the details of weddings, either, since he'd only attended Weasley weddings, and each one had been different. Harry snorted mildly. All things considered, lack of knowledge there wasn't likely to be a problem.

"What?" Malfoy glanced at him.

Harry blinked at him, surprised to realize that Malfoy could so easily read that as a sound of amusement. "Sorry," he murmured. "I just—private joke."

"Tell me? I could use one of those right now." Malfoy turned his head to stare at the coffin again. Harry studied him covertly. His cheekbones stood out against his skin, and he looked as though he'd spent the night bathing in acid. Yes, guilt over Latham or something else was rendering him in need of some comfort right now, Harry thought.

"Not that funny," Harry said. After a year of no one but Lionel ever noticing that Harry was in love with him, Malfoy had come close to the secret twice, once right after the Larkin case and now. Harry shook his head. "What happened to you?" he added quickly, because Malfoy was opening his mouth and he knew that the best way to distract most people was to get them to talk about themselves.

Malfoy watched him from the corner of his eye for a moment before he responded. "That obvious?"

Harry nodded. "To someone who knows what he's looking for, yes."

Malfoy closed his eyes and gave a long, slow snort that seemed to draw most of the breath out of his lungs. "I was engaged not long ago," he said quietly. "A year back. To Daphne Greengrass. She's in Azkaban now."

Harry winced. Lionel was dead, but at least Harry could look back on the memories he had of him and declare that Lionel had always been honorable. There was nothing like robbery or murder lurking in his past. "What happened?" he asked quietly, and then elaborated when Malfoy twitched his head at him. "I mean, did she kill someone, or did she make the wrong Wizengamot member angry, or—"

"Murder." Malfoy breathed the word, as though it was too dirty to speak at a funeral, as though everyone here wouldn't already be thinking of it, as though Latham hadn't died that way. "Murder on impulse. There was no—reason for it. And she's _normal_, otherwise. But when she loses her temper, she can't control herself."

"Fuck," Harry said. He hesitated. He had been right when he said that everyone in the graveyard would see shadows and corpses everywhere, but he didn't think anyone here but Malfoy would see the violently murdered corpse of a potential marriage.

He reached out, deciding that no one else was watching and he could risk it, and squeezed Malfoy's wrist.

Malfoy jumped, which rather defeated the point of the concealment Harry had tried for. He stared at Harry's hand on his arm as though it was a spider. Harry flinched, but didn't pull away. He thought that Malfoy needed to hear this more than he needed Malfoy not to look disgusted.

"I can't imagine how hard that must be," he said. "Visiting someone in Azkaban." It never crossed his mind to think that Malfoy didn't visit. Of course he did. He would have done the same thing if his father was still there, Harry was sure. "Knowing someone close to you did something that means you can never trust them again."

Malfoy looked at him, mouth slightly open. Harry held back the impulse to check his clothes for a bad smell or something. Was it really that unbelievable that Harry would want to comfort him?

_That unbelievable that someone in general wants to comfort him, maybe._

That sounded more likely, and it gave Harry the strength to soldier on. "Anyway. I've never done that. And it's sheer luck. There was a while after the war when we thought George Weasley would commit crimes because his twin was dead." Harry shuddered. That had been worse, in some ways, than the time that he had floated from one partner to another after Ron left the Aurors, because he had been sure he would find one eventually. He had _never _been sure what he would find when it was his turn to stop by Weasley's Wizarding Wheezes and check on George. "I could have had someone in my family who did that." He hesitated, wondering if he should tell Malfoy about Sirius, and decided not to push it. He would if Malfoy brought it up, but otherwise, it really wasn't important to the point that he was trying to make.

"You did," Malfoy said. His voice was twisted, odd. "Your godfather. Not related to you by blood, but neither was Daphne to me."

"He was innocent," Harry said quietly. "It's a long story, but yeah, he really was. Wormtail was the one who committed the crimes he was accused of, who betrayed my parents to the Dark Lord." Most of the time, he would have just said "Voldemort," but he was trying to be considerate to Malfoy.

A wasted effort, maybe, since Malfoy only stood there with a stunned look on his face. "_Wormtail? That _sniffling little pisspot?"

Harry grinned a bit. It was nice to know that someone else shared his opinion of Pettigrew. "Yeah. He sounds—he sounds a bit like your fiancée, actually. He should never have had the courage to commit big crimes. It was jealousy that drove him to it, not temper, but the principle's the same."

* * *

Draco blinked. For a moment, the people moving around him seemed to slow and stop, and the regular chanting of the wizard in charge of making sure that the burial rites were properly carried out faded into the background.

Potter thought they were the _same_? Even if it was about something so trivial as who was connected to them?

Yes, he did. Draco prided himself on being able to tell, already, when Potter was lying, and the fixity of his eyes now and the tight clutch of his hand argued that he wasn't. His grip was warm, too, and Draco leaned into it almost without meaning to as he thought.

There had been no one else he could talk to about Daphne, unless Gaia counted as a "one." His partner Kellen Moonborn had sympathized, but also told Draco that he was better off separated from a woman who could kill someone else without a moment's notice, and then a few months later he was dead himself. His parents didn't communicate with him. He had people in the Auror Corps who would nod to him in passing, but no one he would consider trusting with such personal and delicate information.

Now, there was Potter.

Draco thought about rejecting the sympathy, and shook his head in the end. He had starved too much and too long for it, starved for respect and someone who would look at and take him seriously.

And if their partnership got someone in the Ministry angry at them, including Potter's friends or the Minister or the Head Auror, then Draco thought it worth it.

"Perhaps you're right," he murmured. "But I like to have control of my life, and Daphne's sudden disappearance from it meant that I didn't."

Potter nodded. "I know the desire, although not the feeling."

Draco eyed him thoughtfully. "What things would you have changed about your life, if you had the chance?"

It was an innocent enough question, a natural one to ask at a funeral. Draco thought Potter would say something relating to their latest case, about how he wished he could have solved it faster or prevented Latham's death or prevented himself from owing a life-debt to Draco.

Instead, Potter's face went still, and he stared blankly at the coffin for a moment. Then he shook his head.

"Have you ever thought," he murmured, "that sometimes, if you could go back and change something, then it might not actually turn out the way you wanted? Of course I want my parents alive, but that might have meant that V—You-Know-Who never died. And I want Sirius alive, but he seemed so unhappy towards the end. He might have ended up getting killed by someone else. Tortured to death. I just don't know."

Draco hated this feeling, as though he was slipping around on top of a lake of black ice. Something immediately under the surface beckoned for his attention, but the ice—transparent as it was, as it should be—kept him from noticing it. He did take a tentative step forwards and reached out to touch Potter's arm.

"What are you thinking of?" he asked. "Something more recent than that, by your tone."

* * *

Harry froze.

_How does he keep _doing _that_?

Ron and Hermione had been with him all through his mourning for Lionel, and never managed to realize that he was mourning more than a fallen partner. The Head Auror had thought Harry's grief so subdued that he'd waited less than a month to assign him to a new partner, instead of the traditional mourning period of three. And now Malfoy kept pushing himself into this, into the most private part of Harry's private business, and Harry had no idea how to keep from revealing it.

But he would have to do _something_, because Malfoy was watching him with interested eyes, and Harry realized now how Malfoy would keep digging and chipping at something if it didn't satisfy him. He had done that with Harry's explanations of his visions and the way that they thought about Larkin's flaw. He had been wrong in some respects, but he had clung to the idea anyway.

"I would have changed the way that my last case before the Larkin one worked out," Harry said quietly, and bowed his head so that Malfoy couldn't see his eyes. It was the truth, after all, and the one that Malfoy didn't have any reason to keep digging at once it was revealed. Harry knew that he'd lost his former partner recently, too, although because the record was sealed, Harry knew no more than that. "My partner deserved more rescue than I could give him."

Malfoy's eyes shimmered as he studied Harry. Then he nodded and relaxed from his tense stance, turning back to the coffin. "I know the feeling."

Harry closed his eyes and listened to the words the funeral wizard was chanting.

"From light to darkness, from summer to winter, from flesh to soil, from above the earth to beneath the earth…"

Harry listened to the words, pulled them inside himself, words about natural cycles, about the way that everyone passed through life and came eventually to death. Or at least, he thought that was what they were about. He was missing the context that came before and after, he had to admit.

Maybe he could do that with Lionel. Think of this as his funeral, release his spirit as much as he could, and lose the rest in the talks with Mind-Healers and therapists that he'd planned to have anyway since the Larkin case. Shut away the past and pay his respects to the dead and then to the living.

He had to do it, or some version of it. Obviously, his guard was slipping, and he was letting strangers peer too much into his brain. Lionel would have hated having secrets exposed like that.

He could do this. It would take some practice, that was all.

* * *

Draco watched Potter. His face had alternated between pale and red for most of the funeral, but now it seemed to smooth out and turn a more normal color. He bowed his head and clasped his hands in front of him as if praying.

Draco turned to listen to the words of the funeral chant.

"…from east to west, from sunrise to sunset, to the sunset of life." The wizard in the white robe turned and gestured, and the magic that was woven into the wood of Latham's coffin came to life in a soft burst of green, creating the illusions of tender faces and loving arms as the coffin drifted into the grave.

Watching it go, Draco felt himself relaxing at a deep and fundamental level. It wasn't that much in the scheme of his life, but he had told Potter about Daphne and received some sympathy. He had got out of the house and thought about something other than his own troubles for a while, exactly as Gaia had advised. He had plenty to think about now, Potter's secrets and troubles as well as his own.

No one could go back in time and heal the past, and from what Potter said, Draco knew that not everyone would even want to.

But one could find new entertainments. New partners. New thoughts about living.

Draco eyed Potter again, and decided that he looked more than normal now. Peaceful, almost, as though someone besides Latham was being laid to rest here.

_There is still life in the shadow of the dead._

**The End.**


End file.
